The electoral battle is nearing its epilogue in ultra-polarized Brazil

• Nina Jurna

  correspondent South America

Brazilians are preparing for what are already being called the most exciting and important elections in the country’s recent history. On Sunday, the fierce electoral battle, in which the first round of voting had already been cast earlier this month, will come to a head. Then the polling stations close at 5 pm; a few hours later it is announced who will be the new president of Brazil.

Will far-right president and former army captain Jair Bolsonaro (67) be re-elected? Or will former Social Democratic President Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva (77) lead the country again?

According to the latest polls by the famous Brazilian pollster Datafolha, Lula (49%) is ahead of Bolsonaro (44%). The 5 percentage point margin makes the head-to-head race even more exciting.

The archrival Bolsonaro and Lula are ideologically diametrically opposed. The campaign is primarily about people and what they represent to their supporters; less attention is paid to the content.

In the eyes of his supporters, Bolsonaro mainly represents traditional and conservative family values, emphasizing the fear of the so-called gender ideology and the left. He opposes progressive ideas about homosexuality and transgender, for example, and about issues like the legalization of abortion and soft drugs.

In Bolsonaro’s struggle, evangelical Christian believers, who have grown enormously through the powerful and often dogmatic Pentecostal churches in Brazil, originally Catholic, are an extremely important tool.

How it works and why they support Bolsonaro, you can see in this video:

Lula da Silva and his supporters fear that the democratic values ​​and institutions that have been jeopardized by Bolsonaro in recent years will be further eroded if the far-right leader wins the election.

Over the past four years, Bolsonaro has repeatedly attacked institutions such as the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Electoral Council which organizes elections. He has already announced that he will not accept a defeat in this election. Bolsonaro openly doubts the reliability of the electronic voting system. This, he says, is fraudulent, although it has been used for years.

Bolsonaro has been dubbed the “tropical Trump”, which has to do with the tools he uses to bind his supporters. Like his ideological example of him Trump, Bolsonaro has been using fake news and disinformation since the last election of 2018. They will be thrown back into the fray in this election.

Incidentally, Lula’s side is also guilty of this campaign fake news. The fear that a loss of Bolsonaro could lead to scenes like before in the United States, where Trump supporters stormed the Capitol early last year, is real.

Bolsonaro uses his own social media channels, where he conducts a brilliant election campaign. He uses popular music and national symbols of Brazil, such as the flag and the national anthem, which he appropriated after the previous elections.

In his campaign, Lula promises, in addition to “ensuring” democracy, a recovery of the Brazilian economy. Under Bolsonaro, he stagnated, partly due to the corona pandemic. An estimated 33 million Brazilians are suffering from hunger, even though the problem was eliminated under Lula.

In this campaign, Lula likes to refer to “heyday”, the years he was president. During his reign, between 2003 and 2010, Brazil was one of the emerging economies as a BRIC country. This was partly due to large goods and oilboom, making the economy grow by up to 7% in a few years. Social programs, such as family benefits introduced under Lula, have helped tens of millions of Brazilians out of the worst poverty in the middle class.

But for many Brazilians, Lula is also the symbol of the great corruption scandal, Operation Lava Jato. More than a hundred politicians and senior officials were arrested for this, including the former president himself. In 2018 Lula was sentenced on appeal to 12 years in prison, but she was released after 580 days. Subsequently, the charges against her were declared null and void by the Supreme Court.

There is also a lot at stake in these elections internationally. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil lost international prestige and became further isolated. Bolsonaro was discredited for his Amazon policies. Under his rule, logging has increased significantly there. If he wins, it is feared that deforestation will increase further as it further opens the Amazon to economic activity.

On an extremely tense election weekend, in a country that has never been so polarized before, it will be all about what happens when a large part of the population is disappointed.